B A C K   I N   T H E   D A Y...

It's true. I harbor a certain nostalgia for the early days of HTML. Grey backgrounds, square pictures, endless clunky, inaccessible blocks of text. Pictures of engineers, their cubicles, their dogs, their motorcycles. I was a production artist in a print design firm at the time, in 1994, and observed firsthand the resistance with which the web was first met by many designers. The traditionalists clung tenaciously to their linotype and photostats, keeping their distance from the digital domain. But the slow, costly migration from hand drawn mockups to photoshop storyboards had begun, and digital production for print design was more than a virtual reality for many. But "design" for the Internet? What engineer had the audacity to claim "design" for the "web" when designers couldn't spec type, control dimensions or placement, even wrap text? The same nagging question cycled through the collective designer unconscious: why hadn't anyone consulted any designers on this so-called standard? HTML 1.0 introduced the integration of text and image over a live internet connection. But that original specification was extraordinarily limited from a "design" point of view, supporting incredibly primitive assumptions about design. Four years, countless illegal tags and clever spacing tricks later, dynamic HTML presents designers with the robust functionality that qualifies as a true design tool. Web content is shedding its shackles; the screen is no longer the digital equivalent of construction paper cutouts. We can begin to think of it as an active environment, a zone in which content moves, and can be moved.

-> C H A N N E L   D E S I G N

1   back then	2   channel design	3   interface	4   live content
	5   kinematics	6   bit budget	7   samples	8   conclusion